SAN CLEMENTE — Looking back at his childhood in the 1960s and ’70s, Scott Melcher remembers how fun it was having a miniature golf course on corner of Calle Valle and El Camino Real.

Long after it went out of business and was replaced by a motel, Melcher thought it would be a neat thing to bring back to San Clemente.

Now he’s pitching an idea to City Hall: Why not let him lease one acre of a proposed 45-acre sports park on Avenida Vista Hermosa, and he’ll build a lushly landscaped, 36-hole miniature golf course for the community?

Paradise Miniature Golf, as he calls it, would occupy what is now targeted to be a group picnic area in a corner of a park that the city is struggling to find enough money to build. The rest of the Avenida Vista Hermosa park would have baseball fields, soccer fields, an aquatics center, a community center, gymnasium and more.

Melcher, a 45-year-old mortgage banker, thinks San Clementeans of all ages would embrace miniature golf, and so would people in nearby towns, since the nearest miniature golf courses are in Irvine and Vista.

“This will be the jewel of south Orange County,” Melcher says. “The best part is, it’s not costing the city a dime.”

He asks people not to picture the old funky stereotype of miniature golf with circus music and plastic clowns. He is looking at tropical landscaping, waterfalls, fountains and “challenging, yet playable” holes designed to encourage patrons to return to try to improve their scores – all of it ADA-compliant, with no stairs or other obstacles.

Melcher quietly came up with the idea, researched what if would take to build a quality facility and mentioned it one day to San Clemente’s community development director, Jim Holloway, at a Sunrise Rotary meeting. Melcher and Holloway are Rotarians.

Holloway’s eyes lit up, Melcher said, and that’s the reaction he has seen repeatedly as he has floated the idea among other people in town. City parks commissioner Bill Thomas asked Melcher if he had a business plan. So he produced one. It convinced him that this is an idea whose time has come.

“The kids are always saying there’s nothing to do,” Melcher says. “This gives the kids a place to congregate and have fun.”

HIS PROPOSAL

Melcher hires Harris Miniature Golf Courses, a New Jersey firm he says has built more than 400 courses, to bring to life his tropical design concept. He operates it, figuring the course will cost him $1.5 million and would gross $600,000 a year. He wants to lease the site long term from the city for $57,000 a year or 10.5 percent of gross sales. The city’s percentage would amount to $63,000, which the city could use to help meet operational costs for the rest of the sports park.

THE COURSE

He has designed two 18-hole courses – nicknamed Ohana and Aloha – one for general play, the other reserved for birthday parties, reunions, corporate parties, civic clubs’ fundraisers and the like. Melcher says he’d like to run miniature golf leagues for children and seniors, offer freebies for outstanding local students’ achievements and host his own charity events. And any civic organization that now holds benefit golf tournaments, he says, could do a miniature golf version.

COSTS

$7.50 for adults, $5.50 for kids or seniors. Military personnel and their families, free. It wouldn’t be a place for kids to idly hang out on a Friday night, because you’d have to pay to get inside the gate, whether you intend to play golf or not.

CLUBHOUSE

Melcher envisions offering snacks in a small clubhouse and patio off the 18th hole, where patrons could sit and enjoy an ocean view.

ENHNACEMENTS

Other family entertainment could be incorporated – like a virtual driving range for adults (inside the clubhouse) with hi-end video car races or other games for kids. Melcher is considering a batting cage, remote-control boat rentals in the ponds, remote-control vehicle rentals on the paths and a rock-climbing wall. Perhaps a Paradise line of clothing.

USER BASE

More than 305,000 people, Melcher says, live within a 15-minute drive.

He says his idea can be highly profitable but also is a win-win for the community. He says he loves San Clemente, has done well, is active in the community and, with wife Corrie, is raising three children here. He sees his idea as something nice for them.

Fred Swegles grew up in small-town San Clemente before the freeway. He has covered the town since 1970. Today he covers San Clemente and San Juan Capistrano. He was in the second graduating class at San Clemente High School, after having spent the first two years of high school in double sessions at historic Capistrano Union High School in San Juan. When the new high school opened, he became first sports editor of the school paper, The Triton. He studied journalism and Spanish at USC on scholarship, graduating with honors. Was sports editor of the Daily Trojan. Surfed on the USC surf team. (High school surfing didn't exist back then.) With the Sun Post, he began covering competitive surfing from the mid-1970s, with the birth of the the modern world tour and the origins of high school surf teams. He got into surf photography and into world travel. Has surfed on six continents (not Antarctica). Has visited 11 San Clementes. Has written photo-illustrated profiles on most of them, with more in the works.

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